New York
LondonBeijing
Interface for Composing Queries That Include Subqueries for Complex Databases

Interface for Composing Queries That Include Subqueries for Complex Databases

José A. Martínez F. (Tecnológico Nacional de México, Mexico & Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Madero, Mexico), Juan Javier González-Barbosa (Tecnológico Nacional de México, Mexico & Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Madero, Mexico), and German Castillo (Tecnológico Nacional de México, Mexico & Instituto Tecnológico de Ciudad Madero, Mexico)
Copyright: © 2021 |Pages: 30
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-4730-4.ch009
OnDemand:
(Individual Chapters)
Available
$37.50
Current Special Offers
No Current Special Offers
TOTAL SAVINGS: $37.50

Abstract

Currently, there exist tools for query composition that can be used by users who are not skillful in a DB query language such as SQL. Many tools are difficult to use, and others cannot answer some queries that inexperienced users would like to formulate. This chapter describes the new functionality developed for a query composition interface, which allows inexperienced users to compose queries that involve one, two, or three subqueries without the need to have any knowledge of neither SQL nor the database schema. The experimental tests showed that users could easily compose queries that involve one subquery. Furthermore, the new functionality preserves the domain independence of the previous version of the interface. Additionally, like the earlier version, the latest release offers language independence; that is, it can be configured for other languages similar to Spanish, for example English, French, Italian, and Portuguese.
Chapter Preview
Top

Background

This section describes some terminology and basic concepts to understand better the interface and the systems presented in the following section.

As mentioned previously, the need to access information stored in databases has been a decisive motivation for developing different computer applications, among them, query composition interfaces. These tools use different methods for query composition to generate a query in some database query language, such as SQL (e.g., Pazos et al., 2015) and MDX (e.g., Porras, Florencia-Juárez, Rivera & García, 2018), in order to obtain from the database the information specified by the user.

The following list includes the most common methods used by some interfaces for query composition:

  • •

    QBE (Query by Example) for query composition.

  • •

    Dropdown lists to select elements for query composition.

  • •

    Drag and drop to select tables and columns of the database schema.

  • •

    Menu-based interface to carry out the query composition.

  • •

    Predefined templates to perform query composition.

Domain independence is the term used to refer to interfaces that can be used to query different databases (ideally, any database). Domain-independent interfaces need an initial configuration process before the final users can introduce their queries.

Top

The interfaces presented in this section use different methods to carry out the query composition. An important aspect is that they have been designed to be used by inexperienced users, i.e., they have no knowledge of a DB query language such as SQL.

Complete Chapter List

Search this Book:
Reset